Making music has gotten easier; selling it has gotten harder. Making music has been democratized, but the market is in the hands of fascists.

Drummers shouldn't just think of themselves as drummers. If you're going to be a musician, you should expand your horizons, compose things, and work with other instruments.

People are disappointed when they hear my American accent because they regard 'The Police' as an English band but I've clung to my American-ness all the way.

Don't believe everything you see on VH1.

That whole thing of replicating what others do is a siren call. The sirens lure you to the rocks of unoriginality.

Music has an immediate effect. If you want to go beyond that and look underneath, film is a good way of explaining.

[If] you don't have any soul and you don't have any talent, jazz is what you should do. ... any fool can do it; all you gotta do is practice.

Ive got Arabic music in my blood.

In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event.

I'd rather duplicate it myself. Another of our favourite techniques.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

Our love for our country is worth nothing if it deprives us of our sense of humanity, if it destroys positive consensus.

I make a project and I panic. Which is good, it can be a method. First, panic. Second, conquer panic by working. Third, find ways to solve your doubts.

The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means time influence and educational advantages but what he will do with the things he has.

It behaves more like a tribe than a democratic institution...responding to custom rather than reason and using its own liturgy and language for the conduct of its domestic affairs.

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

I didn't have to go to school, graduate and then go, What am I going to do? I knew from the beginning.

There really is a certain magic that happens when you're in the studio. And it's important in life to feel that magic: to feel that there is something greater moving all this along.

What is well rooted cannot be pulled up. What is firmly grasped will not slip loose. It will be honoured from generation to generation.

Everything human is pathetic

In Japanese houses the interior melts into the gardens of the outside world.